"A nun who faked her own death, an archbishop who went into battle with an army of clergymen, and why being a priest was the most dangerous job of the Middle Ages: these are just some of the stories beginning to emerge from fourteenth-century records held in the University of York’s archives." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Joan of Leeds was fed up of her life in a medieval nunnery. By 1318, her urge to escape the vows she had pledged to poverty, chastity and obedience had grown so strong that she resorted to faking her own death."
Note: According to the story, Joan faked an illness and her own death, then tricked the other nuns into burying a dummy. This seems unlikely, to say the least -- unless the other nuns were blind as bats -- but apparently some of them helped her to pull it off:
"A number of Joan's fellow nuns aided and abetted her plan, although it is less certain whether they did so willingly or were tricked into helping her. Believing—or pretending to believe—her to be dead, and to being deceived by the dummy, they buried it as her—with full Catholic rites—'in a sacred space amongst the religious of that place', wrote Archbishop Melton [who discovered her escape]. Joan's motives for escaping the nunnery are unknown, but the Archbishop put it down to a desire to follow 'the way of carnal lust', which she was unable to do in orders having taken vows of poverty and chastity."
1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.
(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.
Video from 2016.
The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.
According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.
"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."
Video from 2016.
After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:
"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)
Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.
Video from 2010.
Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))
"Books of Hours are private devotional books that were enormously popular with wealthy Catholics in the fifteenth century. They were typically structured around the hourly prayers observed in monasteries, and devout Catholics were expected to stop eight times a day and recite the appropriate liturgy." Source: Abe Books.
These fantastic illuminated books are valuable collector's items today. "As a group, Books of Hours are arguably the most beautiful of all books. They are also some of the most expensive, with modest examples starting in five figures. One of the finest Book of Hours -- the richly illuminated Rothschild Prayerbook -- sold for a record $13.5 million (£8.6 million) in 1999."
Comment: Considering all the time, money and painstaking craftsmanship that went into creating these masterpieces, it's obvious that they weren't just simple prayer books. Books of Hours are classic examples of conspicuous consumption. Back in the medieval world, they were a display of affluence, of discretionary economic power and the political influence that goes along with it. As hyper-expensive collector's items, they're still symbols of wealth, sometimes massive wealth as in the case of the Rothschild Prayer Book. This is more than a little ironic considering their content and Jesus' teachings about the "poor in spirit," but this tension between spirituality and earthly power runs all through the history of the Christian church.
These are beautiful books, works of art, but they're too safe, too harmless to be really interesting. Nobody would have gotten into trouble for owning a Book of Hours containing devotions presumably authorized by the church. I like my medieval books to be more dangerous than that. The most interesting ones were the grimoires and banned Bible translations that had to be hidden away on pain of death or banishment. Handcrafted books gave their contents a kind of magical power, especially in an age of widespread illiteracy, and the most powerful books were full of forbidden knowledge. Books are mass-produced today, but we still have forbidden books that can't be displayed openly and have to be read more or less in secret. The public denunciations and rituals of secrecy surrounding these books give their contents an aura of dark energy that you'll never find in a mass market paperback.
"A tower of human skulls unearthed beneath the heart of Mexico City has raised new questions about the culture of sacrifice in the Aztec Empire after crania of women and children surfaced among the hundreds embedded in the forbidding structure." Source: Reuters (July 2017).
"Archaeologists have found more than 650 skulls caked in lime and thousands of fragments in the cylindrical edifice near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City."
Next video shows some of the ruins and artifacts of Templo Mayor. Several documentaries about the temple can be found on YouTube, but most of them are only available in Spanish.
The Aztecs weren't the first MesoAmerican civilization to practice human sacrifice -- the earlier Olmecs are also thought to have butchered people on top of pyramids -- but the Aztecs took the practice to "an unprecedented scale," according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, which goes on to point out that the early stories about Aztec bloodthirstiness were probably exaggerated by the Spanish in an attempt to justify their own brutality against the natives.
"Blood-Drenched Altars will be a surprising, if not indeed a shocking, revelation to modern readers. For here is contained the key to understanding Mexico. Tracing the history of Mexico from its very beginnings, the author outlines the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Indians under Montezuma and exposes the lie that the Spanish destroyed a flourishing Indian civilization. Rather, this book shows how they ended an Aztec reign of terror over the other Indian tribes, highlighted by human sacrifice and cannibalism on an unprecedented scale--some estimates being 80,000 a year sacrificed and as many as 20,000 at one festival." -- from the back cover of Blood-Drenched Altars.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested not only in getting both sides of the story but in reading history as it was written before political correctness polluted our entire culture. Whether you accept the Catholic version of events or not, there's no doubt that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale:
"Conducted at specially dedicated temples on the top of large pyramids such as at Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, sacrifices were most often carried out by stretching the victim over a special stone, cutting open the chest and removing the heart using an obsidian or flint knife." (Ancient History Encyclopedia) Next video demonstrates how this could have been done.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the conquistadors and the priests who followed them exaggerated the numbers of Aztec sacrificial victims. After all, it's unlikely that the Spanish actually counted the people being led to the tops of pyramids to have their hearts torn out. But if archaeologists are still digging up "towers of human skulls" in Mexico City, it's obvious that the Aztecs were killing a lot of people. Their brutality against their neighbors was one of the main reasons the Spanish had no trouble defeating the Aztec Empire.
This latest discovery doesn't "cast new light" on the Aztecs. Rather, it confirms once again what we already know about them.
Comment: I don't believe in God myself, so the nature of the god I don't believe in has always been more or less irrelevant. Now that I think about it, though, this three-faced Christian deity seems to be completely pagan.
The Christian god has three aspects or personalities, just like the pagan gods had different manifestations. Take Zeus, for instance. Zeus Olympios was the king of the gods, Zeus Georgos, the god of crops and harvests in Athens, Zeus Tallaios a solar deity worshiped in Crete, and so on.
Another example of this would be the Hindu god Brahma, usually pictured as having four faces signifying different aspects of his underlying nature. (Image: Probably Nurpur, Punjab Hills, Northern India [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.)
As it turns out, the Christian god we're all so familiar with has deeper pagan roots than I would have thought.
The concept of the Trinity as such isn't found in the Bible, apparently, but there are references to "the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." The idea of a three-in-one god was basically invented by the church, which borrowed heavily from pagan philosophy when it came up with the doctrine. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he doctrine of the trinity . . . is not a product of the earliest Christian period, and we do not find it carefully expressed before the end of the second century."
The Trinity doctrine was influenced by Greek metaphysical philosophy and created a split in the early church:
"Such metaphysical thinking was common among the intelligentsia of the Greek world and carried over into the thinking of the Roman world of the New Testament period and succeeding centuries." Source: United Church of God. The so-called "true" church "resisted such infiltration" and "... [t]wo distinct threads of Christianity split and developed separately—one true to the plain and simple teachings of the Bible and the other increasingly compromised with pagan thought and practices adopted from the Greco-Roman world."
Apparently the doctrine of the Trinity wasn't formally accepted until the fourth century when Christianity became the official state religion of what was left of the Roman empire:
"Nontrinitarianism (or antitrinitarianism) refers to Christian belief systems that reject the doctrine of the Trinity as found in the Nicene Creed as not having a scriptural origin. Nontrinitarian views differ widely on the nature of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Various nontrinitarian views, such as Adoptionism, Monarchianism, and Arianism existed prior to the formal definition of the Trinity doctrine in AD 325, 360, and 431, at the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, respectively. Following the final victory of orthodoxy at Constantinople in 381, Arianism was driven from the Empire, retaining a foothold amongst the Teutonic tribes. When the Franks converted to Catholicism in 496, however, it gradually faded out. Nontrinitarianism was later renewed in the Gnosticism of the Cathars in the 11th through 13th centuries, in the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, and in some groups arising during the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century." (Wikipedia)
It's ironic that some of the so-called heretical Christian movements, at least in this one aspect, were more scripturally "pure" than the official church.
"The Christian doctrine of the Trinity ... holds that God is one God, but three coeternal consubstantial persons or hypostases—the Father, the Son (JesusChrist), and the Holy Spirit—as 'one God in three Divine Persons'. The three Persons are distinct, yet are one "substance, essence or nature" (homoousios). In this context, a 'nature' is what one is, whereas a 'person' is who one is." (Wikipedia)
Some people think that the Christian concept of the Trinity is incoherent. Rodrigo Duterte, the gentle and soft-spoken president of the Philippines, is one of them:
"The Philippines’ eccentric [sic] leader has shared his views on the cornerstone tenets of the Christian faith, calling the Holy Trinity doctrine 'silly' and claiming that it was 'unimpressive' for a true god to get himself crucified." Source: RT.
According to Duterte, "there is only one god, period." He wants his people to ditch the Catholic church with its three-faced god and all of its "cursed saints," and start worshiping at home.
I don't know if this is a specifically Catholic thing, but Christians in the Philippines stage some very bizarre and violent mock crucifixions to celebrate Easter.
Video from March, 2018.
Duterte, who says he was molested by a Catholic priest when he was young, has made a few typically mild and understated comments about the crucifixion as well:
"I’m God and you will crucify me?! Motherf**ker. I’d tell them: ‘Lightning, finish all of them. Burn all the non-believers’." (RT)
Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I can see the generational change he talks about in my own family. My grandparents were highly religious, my parents less so -- though still churchgoers -- and I'm probably the first outright atheist to come along in my family in a very long time. I might even be the first one, for all I know. Some of my relatives still pay lip-service to going to church, but the churches they belong to are of the Unitarian variety which don't really have any shared creed at all. None of my friends are religious in any way whatsoever. It's not something relevant in our lives.
In the United States, various forms of fundamentalist Protestantism are still thriving, religions like Islam are growing, and there's a fairly large New Age movement which has turned away from traditional Christianity altogether, but things have changed radically over the last century and for all practical purposes we live in an almost entirely secular society. The situation is even more dismal for religion in Europe, where Christianity is basically dead and the remaining churches are little more than Liberal/Socialist community organizations preaching the usual "progressive" gospel of self-destructive Cultural Marxism.
The same liberal disease has infected the more moderate Protestant denominations in the US, which seem to have turned into cults of social work and have been losing members for decades. As for the Catholic Church, it's been shaken repeatedly by corruption and pederasty scandals and the current Pope is just another Social Justice Warrior demanding that Europe open its borders to the immigrant invasion. Christianity is expanding into the Third World, but collapsing in the developed West, and the historical rise and fall of the religion is becoming very clear now.
Once it was established as the official state religion of the West, the Catholic church became so corrupt that it led to the first schisms as well as the rise of dozens of different "heresies." These heretical movements were a direct reaction to the orthodox church's worldliness and hypocrisy and had to be suppressed with torture and executions. For more information on the church's really incredible level of corruption back then, read the first chapter in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, by Henry Charles Lea.
Plagues, corruption and social decay undermined faith in the orthodox church, leading to the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. The schisms within the church continued over the centuries, setting off a chain-reaction of schisms within schisms which led to a proliferation of different denominations -- a process of institutional disintegration that was concealed for a while by the continued religiosity of the masses. But Christianity and religion in general couldn't survive the rise of science and the spread of secularism and rationalism that created the modern western world.
Religion is an archaic survival from thousands of years ago. Like the belief in magic, it's what we would now call a Third World or primitive way of interpreting reality. Spengler predicted that the final decline of the West would see a religious revival that he called the Second Religiousness. Many Spenglerians argue that the rise of Christian Fundamentalism fits the definition and that's probably accurate. As such, the surge in Fundamentalism with its gigantic megachurches is a sign of the West's terminal decline rather than its rejuvenation.
Spengler identified the West with Christianity in many ways -- he saw the great Gothic cathedrals as symbols of the spirit of western culture in its youth -- and he would probably have said that pre-Christian paganism was a feature of the completely different Classical world culture. Viewed from this perspective, the "paganism" of the New Age is a symptom of the decline of the West and the resurgence of irrationality common to the masses of drifting Fellahin existing outside of history. You could say that the New Age movement is a symptom of the Third World creeping into western civilization.
Whatever the case, religion has very little future here, at least for the time being. That could change, though. If these Third World invasions continue, I wouldn't be surprised if religion makes a comeback, just as various diseases thought to have been eradicated are making a comeback. This is where the lecturer in the first video gets it wrong, I think. Religion can make a comeback in the West, but if it does -- if these statistics regarding generational change and secularization reverse themselves -- it will be a sign that the demographics of the West have changed completely.
If that happens -- if religion makes a big comeback -- it will mean that the West no longer exists.
Christmas is a classic example of how the early church Christianized the pagan West by taking over its traditions.
"The Christian ecclesiastical calendar contains many remnants of pre-Christian festivals. Christmas includes elements of the Roman feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. The Chronography of 354 AD contains early evidence of the celebration on December 25 of a Christian liturgical feast of the birth of Jesus. This was in Rome, while in Eastern Christianity the birth of Jesus was already celebrated in connection with the Epiphany on January 6." Source: Wikipedia.
Christmas traditions have deep roots in the ancient pagan world. Take the Christmas tree, for instance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the Devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmastime. It survived further in the custom, also observed in Germany, of placing a Yule (1) tree at an entrance or inside the house during the midwinter holidays."
(1) "... the word Yule has several suggested origins from the Old English word, geõla, the Old Norse word jõl, a pagan festival celebrated at the winter solstice, or the Anglo-Saxon word for the festival of the Winter Solstice, 'Iul' meaning 'wheel'. In old almanacs Yule was represented by the symbol of a wheel, conveying the idea of the year turning like a wheel, The Great Wheel of the Zodiac, The Wheel of Life. The spokes of the wheel, were the old festivals of the year, the solstices and equinoxes. " Source: The White Goddess
In Rome, the period of the winter solstice brought the seven days of the Saturnalia. "Saturn’s great festival, the Saturnalia, became the most popular of Roman festivals, and its influence is still felt in the celebration of Christmas and the Western world’s New Year." (Encyclopedia Britannica).
"The Saturnalia was the most popular holiday of the Roman year," according to the University of Chicago. Catullus describes it as 'the best of days' ... and Seneca complains that the 'whole mob has let itself go in pleasures" ... Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated ... It was an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts, particularly wax candles ... perhaps to signify the returning light after the solstice, and sigillaria."
Everything in Rome came to a stop during the Saturnalia, a festival of licentiousness and role reversals, among other things. According to History Extra, "We say that during Christmas today the whole world shuts down – the same thing happened during the Saturnalia. There were sometimes plots to overthrow the government, because people were distracted – the famous conspirator Cataline had planned to murder the Senate and set the city on fire during the holiday, but his plan was uncovered and stopped by Cicero in 63 BC."
Some Christians see the Saturnalia (and, by extension, Christmas itself) as satanic, which isn't too surprising since Christianity demonized all of the old pagan gods while simultaneously hijacking many of their traditions for their own purposes. In one case, that of Mithra (Mithras) -- the early church's main competitor -- the Christians may have appropriated a pagan god so completely that some have argued that Christ is Mithra in another form.
The identification of Mithra's birthday with Christmas is sketchy. While many sources claim that the god was born on Dec. 25, other sources say that this isn't true and the story seems to be a much later invention. For instance, according to Wikipedia, "It is often stated that Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25. But Beck states that this is not the case. In fact he calls this assertion 'that hoariest of 'facts'. He continues: 'In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in the Calendar of Philocalus. Invictus is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian's sun god. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too.'"
Mithra was said to have been born from a rock (in one version of the story) According to The Mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont (p 131), "the tradition ran that the 'Generative Rock,' of which a standing image was worshiped in the temples, had given birth to Mithra on the banks of a river, under the shade of a sacred tree, and that shepherds alone, ensconced in a neighboring mountain, had witnessed the miracle of his entrance into the world." Like the story of Jesus's birth, the presence of shepherds in the fields suggests that Mithra was born in the spring or summer, not in the dead of winter. Whatever the case, however, the Jesus/Mithra connection is persistent in popular culture:
One interesting fact about Mithraism is that it appeared (in the Roman empire) around the same time that Christianity appeared and seems to have dropped out of sight around the same time that Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of Rome. "The Roman deity Mithras appears in the historical record in the late 1st century A.D., and disappears from it in the late 4th century A.D.," according to The Tertullian Project. It's tempting to see this as circumstantial evidence that Christianity evolved out of Mithraism, but the truth is that all forms of pagan religion began to fade out after the church consolidated its power in the 4th century. Besides, very little is actually known about the teachings of Mithraism, an "organization of cells," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), whose beliefs have to be reconstructed mostly from inscriptions.
None of this really matters, though. Mithras probably wasn't born on Dec. 25, but then neither was Jesus so what difference does it make? The connections between Christmas, ancient Yuletide celebrations and the Roman Saturnalia are clear, so if you're a pagan you might as well go ahead and celebrate Mithra's birthday today as well. Of course, this assumes that you see Christmas as a religious holiday in the first place. A lot of people don't:
"Most Americans celebrate Christmas, but its importance to people as a religious event continues to wane, according to a new survey by Pew Research." (News & Observer, 2017).
"The poll found that while 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, only 55 percent regard it as a religious holiday. Further, the survey found, a decreasing majority of Americans believe in the main elements of the Christmas story as told in the Bible: that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; that three magi came to visit, bearing gifts; that an angel announced the baby’s birth; and that the infant was cradled in a manger."
Christmas has become secularized and increasingly commercial, to say the least. The holiday has degenerated into a month-long orgy of rabid consumerism and mass insanity, a typical example of the decline of the modern world. (Video from 2018)
Personally I have mixed feelings about Christmas. I'm not a Christian, for one thing, and I can't stand what the holiday has become, but traditions are important, especially now that all of our western traditions are under relentless attack by the Cultural Marxists.
So Merry Christmas and if that offends you I couldn't care less.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus (331 - 363 AD) was a great man and one of the last true Romans. He is more commonly known today as Julian the Apostate, the name he was given by the Christian church for his determined attempt to restore paganism in the dying Roman empire.
Born in Constantinople in 331, Julian was "placed in the care of an Arian bishop" as a child and "from 342 was confined for six years on an imperial estate in Cappadocia," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). "He impressed his Christian tutors there as a gifted and pious pupil, but his reading of the Greek classics was inclining him in private to other gods."
Christians who read and think too much tend to lose their faith, even if they're "heretics" like the Arians. "In 351, as a student of philosophy, [Julian] encountered pagan Neoplatonists and was initiated as a theurgist by Maximus of Ephesus," a Neoplatonist philosopher and magician who should be commemorated by pagans everywhere for the role he played in converting Julian to the traditional beliefs of the ancients.
Julian played a double game for years while waiting to see if he would be executed or made emperor. "For the next ten years Julian's pagan 'conversion' remained a prudently kept secret," according to the OCD. "He continued his studies in Asia and later at Athens until summoned to Milan by [Constantius II] to be married to the emperor's sister Helena and proclaimed Caesar with charge over Gaul and Britain."
Julian fought successful campaigns against the Alamanni and Franks that made him very popular with the army, which mutinied and declared him emperor after Constantius "ordered the transfer of choice detachments to the east..." (OCD). Luckily, civil war was avoided when Constantius died later that same year (361) and Julian took over Rome.
He publicly declared his paganism, purged the imperial court, issued a declaration of general religious tolerance that "foreshadowed a vigorous program of pagan activism in the interest of Hellenism," restored "the temples and finances of the ancestral cults," and established "a hierarchy of provincial and civic priesthoods." During the process, "Christian churches and clergy lost the financial subsidies and privileges gained under Constantine and his successors."
Julian discriminated in favor of pagans, but, unlike the Christians themselves, he didn't believe in using violence to persecute the people who didn't share his beliefs. Instead, he tried to marginalize Christianity, partly through argument, such as in his essay Against the Galileans, which is still well worth reading.
Julian's "learning and literary talent" as well as his control of the Roman legal apparatus could have changed the future course of the world in dramatic ways, but he was killed in a "minor skirmish" in his war against Persia after only three years in power. Wounded on June 26, 363, he died three days later on June 29, a day which should also be commemorated by pagans.
By the time of Julian, Rome was already in serious trouble and the western empire would collapse around a hundred years later. Ultimately, Julian was fighting a rearguard action against Christianity, but his reforms might have made a difference if he had lived longer. After all, Christianity owed much of its influence to official support and a lot of important people converted in order to gain the favor of the court. Once that support had been removed, who knows what might have happened?
The real Rome was a pagan, not a Christian, empire. In Julian's day, the empire was being destabilized and distorted beyond recognition by a foreign religion and Julian might have been able to turn that around.
"One of the persistent themes of Julian's antagonism towards the Christian church was his belief that they were troublemakers, causing political discord in any community where they formed the majority: 'they turn everything upside down.'" -- from the introduction to "Julian's Against the Galileans," edited and translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Prometheus Books, 2004.
Here's to Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus. Rest in peace.
"Codex Gigas, otherwise known as ‘the Devil’s Bible’ is the largest and probably one of the strangest manuscripts in the world. It is so large that it is said to have taken more than 160 animal skins to make it and takes at least two people to lift it. It measures approximately 1 metre in length." Source: Ancient Origins.
"According to legend, the medieval manuscript was made out of a pact with the ‘devil’, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Devil’s Bible. It was written in Latin during the 13th century AD, and although the origin of the manuscript is unknown, a note in the manuscript states that it was pawned in the [Cistercian] monastery at Sedlec in 1295."
Note: Sedlec is the home of the bizarre Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel which contains "the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have in many cases been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel," according to Wikipedia.
Christianity Is Becoming A Third-World Religion
1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.
The history of Christianity has been one of schisms and fragmentation, a long process of disintegration caused by theological disputes, administrative squabbles and church corruption. When the Catholic church lost its monopoly during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity as a unified institution (1) ceased to exist. Protestantism itself went through a long chain-reaction of schisms with the result that there are now hundreds of Christian denominations in the world.
(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system, but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.
Video from 2016.
The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "interpreting" their mythology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.
According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.
"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."
Video from 2016.
After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:
"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)
Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.
Video from 2010.
Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))
Updated Feb. 2019
Related:
Why There Is No Way Back For Religion In The West.
Is Religion Dying Out?
Where Churches Have Become Temples of Cheese, Fitness and Eroticism
Posted at 07:00 AM in Catholic Church, Christianity, Collapse, Commentary, Europe, Religion, Videos | Permalink